Today, we’ve got a potent story from San Francisco bureau chief Thomas Fuller:

A decade ago Marie and Surinder Uppal fulfilled what they considered their American dream: the construction of a two-story home next to vineyards in Sonoma County.

But earlier this year, besieged by a mysterious, pungent odor, they wondered if they had made the right decision.

“We said, ‘What the heck is that smell?’” Ms. Uppal said. “We couldn’t figure out what it was. The stench was very bad, stronger than a skunk.”

The Uppals are among hundreds of people across California who have showed up at town hall meetings, petitioned city councils and hired lawyers to fight an unanticipated consequence of marijuana legalization: the stink from pot farms across the state.

Those affected by the smell say it is much more potent than the pot cloud above a Grateful Dead concert or the medicinal smell of a cannabis dispensary.

In the case of the Uppal family, the cannabis was being grown in greenhouses nestled in the vineyard several hundred feet away. One member of the Uppal family with muscular dystrophy, Jiwan, had trouble breathing and was admitted to the intensive care unit of a hospital.

“The smell was so bad we couldn’t even go outside,” Ms. Uppal said.

The smell stretched to the nearby Old Adobe Elementary Charter School, where children playing outside asked what the odor was, according to the school’s principal, Jeff Williamson.

“Some parents were really upset about it,” Mr. Williamson said.

With three other families in the neighborhood, the Uppals sued the pot grower, Carlos Zambrano, who was found to be operating without a license, according to the Uppals’ lawyer, Kevin Block.

The Uppals and their neighbors sued in federal court under the RICO Act — the decades-old law designed to prosecute organized crime — to stop the cannabis operation and recover $60,000 they paid in legal fees so far. The court will hear a motion to dismiss the case on Thursday.

Under a settlement agreement with the county, the grower was ordered to pay more than $400,000 in fines and back taxes. But the settlement came with a twist that puzzled the Uppals: He was allowed to harvest and sell his crop in part so that he could pay the fines.

California Online

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A burned tree and damaged power pole near a destroyed home off of Mulholland Highway.CreditStuart Palley for The New York Times

• Roughly one in 10 buildings are in California’s highest-risk fire zones, according to an analysis of maps drawn by the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. [The Los Angeles Times]

• Facebook has said over and over that it doesn’t sell users’ data. But an investigation found that for years, it has given access to that information — including private messages and friend lists — to other tech giants like Netflix and Spotify without telling users. [The New York Times]

Ali Hassan and his son, Abdullah, at a California hospital. Mr. Hassan’s wife, Shaima Swileh, has been granted a travel ban waiver to come see the boy, who is on life support.CreditCouncil on American-Islamic Relations, Sacramento Valley

• The mother of a toddler on life support in Oakland was granted a visa waiver to see her child. Her application had been stalled because she is from Yemen, one of the countries included in President Trump’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries. [The New York Times]

• “He seems to cultivate this blandness of affect to convey that he deals in facts.” Representative Adam Schiff wants Congress to follow President Trump’s money. [The New Yorker]

• Billboard owners love a traffic jam. Why? Because advertisers can increasingly use your digital data to target you. [The New York Times]

• In the 1960s, when suburbs were growing, a real estate developer envisioned building a city called Marincello on the Marin Headlands. That never came to pass, though, and the rocky area north of the Golden Gate Bridge remains a natural haven. [The Bold Italic]

• U.C.S.D. biologists got a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to research ways of using algae to create plasticthat’s more biodegradable and more sustainable to produce. [City News Service]

• Camp out, hike with goats and sample some super fresh chèvre at Angeles Crest Creamery, a 70-acre working farm in the hills above the L.A. basin that aims to teach visitors about sustainable animal husbandry. [Culture: The Word on Cheese]

• An exhibit at the Fresno Museum of Art called “Black Migrants” will show never-before-seen work by the photographer Ernest Lowe, who documented the lives of black farmworkers in the Central Valley during the 1960s. [Civil Eats]

And Finally …

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A modified Tesla Model X before an event to unveil the Boring Company’s tunnel in Hawthorne, Calif., on Tuesday. It unveiled the first mile-long stretch of the company’s underground vision of a transit system.CreditPool photo by Robyn Beck

Elon Musk, who famously decided to try to build an underground tunnel system when he got fed up with L.A. traffic, unveiled the first mile of said tunnel in Hawthorne on Tuesday.

But as the business reporter Ivan Penn wrote, the reality fell short of big promises from the Boring Company.

Initially, there was supposed to be a system of electric pods that could move 16 people at a time. Instead, a Tesla was lowered into the tunnel. The company said vehicles would be able to move up to 150 miles per hour, but the test was much slower.